Unused cloud and AI credits often expire worthless, and a San Francisco marketplace called Credex wants to change that. The company matches startups holding leftover credits with growing SaaS and AI teams that pay full price for infrastructure.
The gap is easy to see. Programs such as AWS Activate, Google for Startups Cloud and Microsoft for Startups hand out packages worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those credits carry expiry dates, though, and startup plans shift faster than credit schedules. When a company pivots, sells or shuts down, the remaining balance usually disappears.
Meanwhile, AI API spending has become one of the quickest-growing lines in a startup budget. Teams building on Claude, GPT and Gemini pay list price for every token, and GPU compute for training and inference remains costly. For smaller companies, each dollar saved on infrastructure adds to runway.
Credex says buyers can cut cloud and AI spend by up to 50 percent, while sellers get cash instead of a write-off. Founder Aditya Adhana said the company built the secondary market that should have existed years ago, with one side gaining liquidity and the other a lower bill.
Sellers list the provider, balance and expiry date. Credex then checks that the credits are legitimate and transferable, pairs the listing with a verified buyer, and moves account ownership across before payment. Buyers target seed-to-Series B startups and mid-sized SaaS firms, which are too small to win enterprise discounts but too large to ignore the bill. Adhana noted that a 30-person AI startup running heavy inference has little leverage in contract talks.
The catalog stretches across major clouds, GPU providers, developer tools, language model APIs, speech services and image or video generation platforms. Each listing goes through verification before transfer, so buyers receive full account ownership rather than shared logins.
Credex also sees itself alongside cloud cost optimization software rather than against it. Those tools reduce how much infrastructure a team uses, while a credit purchase lowers the price of what remains. Together they attack the bill from two directions.
Credits began as customer acquisition tools for hyperscalers, yet they behave like prepaid infrastructure with real value. Whether a dedicated marketplace can bring order to a trade that has relied on cold messages and trust remains to be seen. Buyers should still confirm each provider’s transfer rules before committing.
